Singer George Ezra: ‘I am aware of who I am in the public eye’

There is a tradition in pop and rock songwriting about young women moving to cities. Namely, that bad things will happen. Think of “Welcome to the Jungle” by Guns N’ Roses, in which Axl Rose warns a young woman the city will bring her to her knees. That doesn’t happen to Tiger Lily, the 21-year-old who moves to town in “Anyone for You”, the opening track on George Ezra’s third album, Gold Rush Kid. She bumps into Ezra, who doesn’t ply her with heroin. Instead, he sings: “And then I said, ‘Here’s my number, hit me up if you’re needing anyone.’” What a nice boy.

And that, pretty much, is how Ezra endeavours to present himself: a tall, good-looking, well-spoken young man with clear skin, a nice smile and clean hair, who grew up in leafy Hertford (he stresses that adolescence brought him nothing to rebel against). Though he is 28 now, you would not be surprised to be told he was actually the captain of the first XI cricket team at a minor private school. “I am aware of who I am in the public eye,” Ezra says with a laugh. “And it could be so much worse: ‘Oh, he’s not very offensive.’”

It’s not just being inoffensive that has made Ezra a star — a proper star: two multi-platinum albums, arena-filling tours, festival headline slots. He has a big, deep, lustrous voice and he and his co-writer Joel Pott, once of the band Athlete, have a knack for writing songs — sometimes a little folky, sometimes bright, primary-coloured pop, always fronted by Ezra and his guitar — that seem to tap into some deep need for, well, niceness.

It’s a big part of his origin story that his first album, Wanted on Voyage, was written after his label, Sony, sent him travelling around Europe on trains to find subject matter, but one could go further. Ezra’s songs actually sound like holidays — not like the sound of cheap bars or booze cruises; not what you hear on holiday. They actually sound like holidays, the best two weeks of the year. (His single “Shotgun” was the sound of summer in 2018 and much of 2019 — it ended up spending 122 weeks in the chart.)

Ezra raises an eyebrow at the notion that he might have seen the commercial advantage in reminding people of their holidays. In fact, he starts complaining about the cynicism of making albums targeted at streaming services, “where you can hear almost every mood-specific playlist that each song would end up on. And I’ve not got that in me, though I’m aware that world exists.”

When people say ‘describe your gigs’, I use the least cool word in the world, which is fun

He’s self-aware enough to know there are beats a George Ezra song has to hit, and honest enough not to pretend these songs just spill out of him and Pott — the breezy effortlessness of them takes a lot of work. “For the audience to be as relaxed as they can be, which is something I aim for, [that] demands that it’s considered beforehand.”

It’s been an odd path for him, though. When he first emerged, just shy of a decade ago, he was clearly being positioned as cool-adjacent, if not cool — a young man playing Americana-influenced music (his early single “Cassy O’” was a deft piece of rockabilly). The cool thing simply didn’t stick, though. Go to see Ezra now and look at his crowd — from couples with white hair through to parents with small kids, via twenty and thirtysomethings — and you are led to the conclusion that he sits in a distinctly British position: the family entertainer pop star, heir to Cliff Richard and Tommy Steele.

He smiles. “I’m never going to refer to myself as a family entertainer, and you know that . . . When people say ‘describe your gigs’, I use the least cool word in the world, which is fun. No one wants to go: ‘Come to see my band, we’re really fun.’ But that’s how it feels to me. I quite like the fact that I feel like one of the few examples of an artist no one needs to clarify or explain.”

Ezra is an odd conversationalist. He’ll make passing references to things in a way that makes plain the references will not be any more than passing (he mentions the “lifestyle I perceived I had to live” when “Shotgun” exploded, without offering further details). Where most songwriters would love to talk about their craft, Ezra is vague. The one thing that keeps cropping up is his mental health.

Ezra suffers from anxiety, and from a form of obsessive-compulsive disorder called pure O: as the name suggests, it’s all obsession, not compulsion. After the success of “Shotgun”, it all became overwhelming. “An awful lot of my discomfort throughout my twenties has been as a result of choosing to present myself to people,” he says. He mentions that the sheer unavoidability of “Shotgun” led him to fixate on people being obsessed with him. “But they just need this song to soundtrack whatever it is. But I hadn’t realised that and assumed that it was going to affect all of them in a really intrusive, negative way.”

He smiles at his naivety in assuming everyone who heard “Shotgun” would become obsessed with him. “Bless. I want to go back and go: ‘Dude, you can go back now and save yourself an awful lot of discomfort by knowing that’s not what happens.’ The record ends and life carries on and looks very normal. That audience just needs that three minutes.”

He has become better with his pure O, too. It manifests in him being caught in a spiral of negative thoughts about himself, often triggered by an outside stimulus. He used to lose months on end to those thoughts, he says, but is now able to recognise them within minutes. “It’s not that they go away,” he says, but recognising his self-hatred as groundless and not the right response helps him.

Those problems do mean, however, that Ezra has a bit of perspective. Most young stars are desperate to crack America; Ezra, despite early success, knows the nine months on the road he would need to break through there simply aren’t worth the risk to his health. He’s a star in Europe and Australasia, and that’s good enough.

“That’s why I think I am relaxed going into this record, because I really do feel as if everything from here is just a bonus,” he says. “It dawned on me watching Joel’s kids laugh at old press shots of him around the dinner table one night, that’s going to happen at some point. It’s gonna be in the past and that’s fine.”

‘Gold Rush Kid’ is released on Sony/Columbia on June 10

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